Field of Blood (2 page)

into the road where it burned on after he had walked past. They came to the hole

that was cut in the hedgerow.

He saw them cock their ears, he saw them turn their heads and swivel their eyes

down the road in front of them and behind them.

There was no weapon in the caravan. Weapons were Belfast. He had no need of a

weapon to keep him safe in a caravan beside the canal near Vicarstown. The taller man's jaw was cartwheeling as he chewed

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**at a mouthful of gum. When they were satisfied they came fast through the hole in the hedge. They crossed the long grass that bordered the vegetable patch

square that he had dug out in the summer. He saw the grimace of annoyance from the taller man as the wet grass splayed over his shoes. He grew the vegetables for the old man in the farm to sell to the store in Vicarstown, lettuce in the spring, carrots and parsnips now that it was winter. He saw that they said not

a word to each other, and nor did they look up at his face in the caravan window.

He knew it would come and yet he was jolted upright by the rap at the caravan

door. His eyes closed. His teeth bit on his lip, and he felt a moment of pain. He

dragged a gulp of air down into his chest. He stared at the door, and he saw the

inexact outline of the two heads beyond the glaze glass.

The shorter man was standing on the step and was lighting a cigarette and smiled as the door was opened. The taller man showed no visible expression.

`Yes?' He tucked the thumb of one hand into his belt, and the other hand was in

his trouser pocket. The strangers should not see the tremble in his fingers.

'McAnally?' The shorter man spoke with the raw accent of West Belfast. Àre you

McAnally?

'Yes.'

`Sean Pius McAnally?

'Yes.'

And your home, up there, is 63 The Drive in Turf Lodge ...?T

'What have you come for?' He snarled the question because that way his nerves

were hidden from them. He disliked them because they had frightened him. He

was not a man who should easily have been frightened. No man who had led an

Active Service Unit in Turf Lodge, Ballymurphy and Whiterock would admit to fear.

Èasy, boy.' The taller man spoke.

`Come to take you back,' the shorter man said.

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`Better talked about inside, pissing cold out here,' the taller man said. `Nobody

tells me where I'm going.'

`Like he said, easy . . .' The shorter man smiled a second time.

McAnally stood aside from the door, made way for the two men to climb up into

the caravan. Suddenly the inside of the caravan was crowded, bursting. It was his

place of refuge, and it was invaded. They looked around them, they stripped the

privacy from the walls. In turn they bent to look at the photographs, at the sink,

at the curtain that hid the chemical lavatory seat. The taller man leaned his bottom against the table‐edge. The shorter man sat on the chair and stretched

out his legs. McAnally closed the door.

`What do you want?

'What I said ...' The shorter man dragged far down on his cigarette,

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went to the door, threw the stub outside, coughed and spat, shut the door, went

back to the chair. 'What I said, come to take you back.'

`Who says? 'It's what we've been told, take you back.'

McAnally thought they might as well have crapped on his floor, on the linoleum,

or they might have pissed on his walls, on the photographs. Between the two of

them they suffocated the privacy of his refuge, the privacy of the caravan.

`What's your name?' McAnally asked the shorter man.

There was a smile without amusement, without pity. `You've been

away too long ... we don't like names.'

McAnally laughed, shrill, excited. `Because you're all riddled with

touts. Weren't any touts in my time.'

'Your time's not done, Gingy,' the taller man said.

McAnally rocked slightly on the balls of his feet. That was his name when he was

in the war. He was always called 'Gingy'. All the men liked a name that was short

and sharp and familiar. All the men had their nick

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names. Ducksy and Cruncher and Puffer and Bronco and Buster and Bluey and Fitzy and ... He was Gingy because the moustache that was now shaved away had once been redder than his hair. He was Gingy in the Turf Lodge, and Gingy in

the A. S. U. He had been Gingy for five years in the Long Kesh prison camp, and

Gingy in the Remand Wing of the Crumlin Road gaol. Gingy was his name before

two years back.

`Who wants me back?'

`The Chief wants you back.' The shorter man grinned. There was a gap in his front upper teeth. NOW that the shorter man wasn't smoking, McAnally could smell his breath and his armpits. `You won't be asking his name?'

McAnally said softly, Ànd what it's for ...?T

'We wouldn't know, would we? Cop on, Gingy. You'll be told when

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you've come back. 'I'm out, I quit.'

`You took an oath, you swore your oath,' the taller man said.

Eleven years before Sean Pius McAnally had made his oath to the Organization.

He had made it in his own home. They couldn't use the front room because his Da

was watching telly, couldn't use the kitchen because his Ma was dishing the supper. He had made his oath on the upstairs landing, and they'd all had to whisper because his sister was trying to get her baby to sleep in the back bedroom. He had made his oath, he had offered his allegiance to the Provisional

wing of the Irish Republican Army.

Àn oath's an oath. An oath's a lifetime,' the smaller man said.

Àn oath doesn't get torn up just because a boy wants to sit on his arse in the south ... and let others do what the boy swore to do himself,' the taller man said,

and McAnally had to lean forward and

strain to hear the words.

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**An oath whispered on the landing of a three‐bedroomed Housing Executive

semi‐detached. An oath made while a sister crooned to a baby, while the telly blared a comedy, while Ma crashed the saucepans.

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`We're wasting time, Gingy,' the smaller man said.

McAnally wondered if they were armed. Didn't matter, because there were two

of them. And two of them could wreck him, and wreck the caravan. As he stared

into their faces his thoughts were totally lucid. If he expelled them from the caravan, if he damaged them, then they'd be back, and others would be back.

The smaller man lit another cigarette and looked into McAnally's face and then

down at the dead match in his fingers and dropped it onto the linoleum. They were squatting over him, crapping on him, pissing on him. He shrugged.

Ì'm not promising anything.'

`You're not being asked to promise anything,' the taller man said. `You're being

told to obey an order from Belfast Brigade.'

McAnally crossed to the bunk, stepping over the outstretched legs of the shorter

man, insinuating himself past the taller man. He crouched down and reached into

the space underneath the mattress for a canvas grip bag. There was always a pain

in his right knee when he bent low where the rubber bullet had ricocheted up from the pavement in the Motorman fight. He winced, and stood up. He

collected the clothes from the drying line and folded them into his bag.

Ìf they want me, then it's something special,' McAnally said to the taller man. He

looked him in the face, eye to eye. Ìf they want me then it's for a job that's too

big for the likes of you fuckers.'

He thought the man would have liked to belt him. He watched his fingers tighten

on the seams of his jeans. The shorter man was making a play of grinding his cigarette out on the linoleum as McAnally zipped up the bag.

Àll I hear on the radio down here is about the touts up there ... Am I safe from

touts if I go back with you?'

The taller man shouted, `You call me a tout, McAnally, and I'll break your neck.

You can be a fucking Battalion Officer, a fucking Brigade Officer, you call me a tout, I'll break your fucking neck.'

McAnally saw the sweat on his forehead. `No one ever informed in my day. You

could beat the shit out of a man, and he never told. Whatever the 'tecs did in Castlereagh and Gough and Strand, a man never touted ...'

`Touting isn't something you make a crack about,' the shorter man said, and the

smile was gone from the white chubbiness of his cheeks.

Ì want to go up to the farm.'

`What for?

'To see the old man.'

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`To tell him you're going back to Belfast, to tell him the boys came to fetch you

back to Belfast?' The sneer of the shorter man. The taller man asked, `What have

you to tell him?'

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McAnally hesitated. He would have told his Ma's cousin that he'd be away for a

few days, that the kestrel needed feeding. He couldn't tell them that, not these

bastards. He shrugged.

`Doesn't matter,' he muttered.

From the hook behind the door McAnally lifted down his anorak, slid his arms into the sleeves.

`Will I see my wife?

'You'll be dropped there tonight,' the taller man hissed.

McAnally unplugged the electric fire, and then the connection to the single bulb

that hung down from the ceiling. He took what remained of a loaf and a packet of

margarine and the bacon and the sausages from the one cupboard and handed

them to the shorter man to hold.

When they were out of the caravan he busied himself fastening the padlock on the door, and then they walked together through the gap in the hedge and onto

the road. They let McAnally walk in front, as if they were an escort to him. From

the roadway he threw the margarine and the bread into the grass by the canal,

and the bacon and the short string of sausages to the place where the kestrel fed.

He reckoned the bird could peck into the margarine carton.

It was mild and there was a fleck of rain in the air and already the light was sliding over the bare‐branched elm trees that were mirrored in the canal.

They went up the road, towards the rusted Cortina that was parked flush to the

hedge.

McAnally looked around him, into the still canal and into the thin stretching roadway and into the small fields and into the deep blanket of cloud. He saw the

kestrel a long way off, watching from a diseased elm branch. He stared back one

last time at the roof of the caravan. He remembered when he had decided to quit

the Organization and go south. He climbed into the back of the car and slumped

against the seat and closed his eyes and heard the gunning of the engine.

The taller man drove. Going north and three hours to Belfast. Three hours for Sean Pius McAnally to reflect that two years of escape was gone.

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He was born into the Falls, screamed his first baby shouts in the front bedroom of

a brick terraced house that was without a bathroom, without a flushing lavatory.

His eldest sister helped the mid‐wife with the delivery.

The early memories were of the van that came to move the cheap furniture from

the old decay of the Falls to the new decay of Turf Lodge. Turf Lodge was a sprawl of a housing estate out to the west of the city of Belfast, and well away from any comparable Protestant housing estate. The memory of the loaded van

competed with the memory of his father coming back to the new house in Turf

Lodge within a week of the move, and his father's lip was bleeding and his front

lower teeth were missing

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**or chipped, and the scurrying words between mother and father were of

intimidation and that the buggers said they wouldn't have a Taig working in a Prot butchers. The memories slid easily into the groove of a father who sat the

days away in front of a fireplace that burnt scavenged wood, a father who no longer believed in the possibility of work. The memories drifted through a three-bedroomed house that was home for a family of Ma and Da and five sisters and

Sean Pius McAnally. The memories eddied into the wearing of a cast‐off blazer

carrying the badge of St Peter's Secondary School, Whiterock Road, a good walk

from Turf Lodge but Ma liked the priests there, and of the misery of homework in

the quiet of the box bathroom that was the pride of a Turf Lodge house; a bloody

waste of time, that homework, because there wasn't work after school for half of

the St Peter's leavers. Gone from school at sixteen, and no exams passed ‐ exams

were for the Protestants in their Academies and Institutions, exams weren't for kids from Turf Lodge.

Those were the distant memories. Sharper were the memories of the times since

the war began.

He was recruited when he left school. The second year of the war.

At first the stoning and the petrol bombing of the Pig armoured cars that patrolled Turf Lodge, the night watch at the end of the Drive and the Avenue and

the Parade with the whistle in his hand and ready to blow the warning if the foot

patrols came through. Aged seventeen he had seen his first soldier die. A file of

soldiers, spaced and on both sides of the Drive, patrolling in Turf Lodge. One echoing crack of the Armalite, one belt from the widow maker. The teenage boy